Stories by: Jim Duffy

Virtualization and cloud computing will help companies accomplish more by breaking the physical bonds of an IT infrastructure and its users, executives from Cisco and Novell proclaimed this week during their keynote addresses at Interop New York. But caveats such as heightened security threats must be overcome in order to fully benefit from this new computing paradigm, they warned.

As part of its aggressive push into becoming an overall IT player, Cisco may be looking to enter the blade server market to round out its data center portfolio and fortify its position in those lucrative, compute-intensive accounts.

China and the United States were the two largest sources of Internet-attack traffic during the first quarter of 2008, accounting for 30 percent of such traffic, according to Akamai Technologies.

Vyatta, a maker of open source routers, this week unveiled a product for the small-to-midsize business market.

Vyatta, a maker of Linux-based routers, this week said its software scales to 10 Gigabit Ethernet, providing enterprises and service providers with an open source alternative to proprietary routers for high-performance requirements.

Open source may have taken another step in becoming a considerable alternative to the old guard for enterprise routing.

Membership growth in social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook in all regions is expected to peak in 2009 and level off by 2012.

A debate within the IEEE threatens to stall work on a 100Gbps Ethernet standard and the very existence of the working group defining it.

Merit Network, the pioneering Michigan research network that played a key role in the development of the Internet, this week will celebrate its 40th anniversary. President Emeritus Eric Aupperle, a 32-year Merit veteran who served as director and president during the organization's heyday in the mid-1980s and 1990s as the operator of the National Science Foundation's NSFnet, spent some time reminiscing and looking ahead with Jim Duffy.

Juniper's Infranet Initiative has been dissolved, replaced by another council staffed and funded by its members, including Cisco and Alcatel, that seeks to develop a business-friendly IP service infrastructure.

The 3G Partnership Project - a consortium of 200 wireless vendors and operators - has begun a study to determine the feasibility of defining a standard that supports wireless downlink speeds as high as 100Mbps.